Joseph Gabel (12 July 1912 in Budapest – 15 June 2004 in Paris)[1] was a French Hungarian-born sociologist and philosopher. His work was always strongly influenced by Marxism; he was against Stalinism and critical of the work of Louis Althusser.
He left Hungary because of a Numerus Clausus for Jewish citizens[1] and first studied Psychopathology with Eugène Minkowski,[2] then he turned to Sociology (he was mainly influenced by Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács). He taught at the Mohammed-V University of Rabat from 1965 to 1971, and at Amiens University from 1971 to 1980.
In 1962, he published his most important work: False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification. From the standpoint of psychopathology, this study works to synthesize Marxist notions of "false consciousness" and reification with the study of schizophrenia.[2] In the following years, Gabel's works stressed the analysis of ideologies and marxist theory of alienation (The Sociology of Alienation, 1971; Idéologies 1974 - 1978; Alienation Today, 1974). Gabel also wrote the articles "Utopia" and "Ideology" in the Encyclopedia Universalis and he was one of the only French specialists on Karl Mannheim.